'Weezer Wednesday' premiere: New album gets a release date; EW goes in the studio

Weezer have spent the bulk of 2014 working hard on a new album called Everything Will Be Alright In The End. They’ve been gradually letting fans in on the process of its creation through a video series they’ve dubbed “Weezer Wednesdays.” The clips have been teasing out not only bits of songs but also details about the album, including the title and the artwork.

EW is super-pleased to bring you the latest installment of “Weezer Wednesdays,” which not only reveals a snippet of a killer new song called “Return to Ithaca” but also confirms the release date for Everything Will Be Alright In The End. Weezer’s latest album will arrive on September 30.

Check out the latest entry below.

You can get an even more in-depth look into the ongoing creation of Everything Will Be Alright In The End in this week’s issue of Entertainment Weekly. I spent two days at the Village Studio in Los Angeles with Rivers Cuomo, Brian Bell, Scott Shriner, and Pat Wilson, and got to see the band work on new material with producer Ric Ocasek. It’s a revealing look into the process of a veteran rock band—one whose debut came out 20 years ago but who still feel most comfortable battling it out in the rock trenches.

The collaboration with Ocasek, who turned the knobs on both the band’s debut and 2001’s Green Album, has helped the group get back to their core sound—one that they had strayed away from on their previous two releases, 2009’s Raditude and 2010’s Hurley. But his hiring wasn’t necessarily a slam dunk. “Ric wasn’t the obvious first choice for us,” Cuomo says. “It’s hard to even remember back to the beginning of 2013, but we weren’t sure of what we were doing or where we were going, and it was really helpful to talk to the other producers out there and get a feel for what it would be like to move in this direction or that direction. It all comes down to weighing our different values, like the sound and the vibe and the energy of where we came from that resonated with so many people and still feels so important and necessary—weighing that against the artist’s need to explore and try new things. In a way, it gets more complicated as your creative career develops, because you have all these different elements you need to maintain and keep integrated as you move forward. Eventually, as we meditated on all the different options, it dawned on us that the vibe we wanted and the sound we wanted and the energy we wanted, there was no one on Earth who could get that better than Ric.”

As for the overall tone of the album, Wilson has good news for hardcore Weezer fans. “If you took the Pinkerton band and then play all the other records—that’s what we sound like now. Bombastic, loose, kind of booming. This record sounds like it’s going to have the tight structure of Blue Album with a little bit more abandon like Pinkerton.“

For more behind-the-scenes looks into the making of Weezer’s forthcoming Everything Will Be Alright In The End, check out this week’s issue and stay tuned to the Music Mix for more updates.